“A miscellany in flashes of realization. Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno takes the tumbled bits of mind, and mind’s penchant for equations (a feeling for ‘is’), in order of appearance. The order is elegant, taken apace, and because the subject is consciousness, there is urgency, too: ‘The notices that arrive with the wind….force flying against force.’ Sawyer-Lauçanno has a strong sense of the fragility of existence, and even more so of the names with which we tend to furnish it.” —Bill Berkson

“Readers who have followed Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno’s inky journey over the decades will be delighted by this new book of poems. A spiritual autobiography where the digressions share equal billing with the main stream of the narrative, where off-the-path is, if anything, as much worth travelling as the path itself, these long poems carve channels for themselves as a river does, and the reader floats along, dipping his hand in here and there. The discoveries the author is constantly surprising us and himself with, make each of the side trips worth taking. Here we are in the company of a spiritual seeker who is also a scholar and a thinker—a rare combination—someone as much at home among the saddhus in the hills above Mussoorie as he is at his desk at home, in the company of books filled with wisdom.” —Richard Tillinghast

Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno lives in Montague, Massachusetts with his wife, the poet Patricia Pruitt. In 2007 he was guest writer at the first Mussoorie Writers’ Festival in India. This book began there.